| Description | Non-Player Characters (NPCs) controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) are widely featured in digital games, providing game worlds with adversaries, allies and general inhabitants. However, a small subset of games foreground the use of these autonomous AI agents such that their interactions are the primary focus of gameplay itself. Although the design affordances of NPCs which are able to interact with their world and each other are rich and surprising, there are unique challenges in communicating the complexity of these systems to the player. Though there is a growing body of research into methods of architecting systems of emergent AI actors (Park, 2009), this research has focused on creating interesting interactions for an audience with a high degree of systems literacy. Similarly, much work has been done into methods for creating believable and relatable NPCs (Warpefelt, 2013), but such work is focused on ways NPCs can be made to mimic human interactions, not in how to better express an underlying NPC behavior system. |
